Friday, March 8, 2013

Breakfast Rolls

They wanted to pick the cheese off and eat it.

Nick was searching the web the other night for some good recipes and he came across this one (go, look at it, drool over it; and then give in and make it!), and even in my half-asleep-stumbling-to-bed state I had to stop and admire them. I fell asleep lamenting the fact that we didn't have any bacon, and thinking about how I would make them with what we do have. I decided that I would make them with lunch meat (since we had it) and shredded cheese. When I got up the next morning I discovered that I was too impatient to wait for the yeast in the sweet rolls to rise, and why go to all of that trouble when I didn't have any bacon anyway? So I made a standard biscuit dough (I just use the recipe on the back of the can of baking powder, but one day I will get buttermilk--and I will make buttermilk biscuits!). I added garlic powder, parsley and sage to the dough; I was going for a sort of seasoned bread taste.

After I rolled the dough out I layered the thin Turkey on it and topped that with shredded cheese. Then I rolled it up, sliced it, put the rolls in my quiche (everything) plate and baked it. Triumph! Right? No. If I had thought this through before I started I would have realized a few things. 1) Rolled dough takes forever to bake. That's why cinnamon rolls take 3 hours. 2) Biscuits are flaky; it's one of the characteristics that make biscuits so good. It's also the thing that makes them bad for rolls.

Flaky, tasty goodness. Imagineit with Bacon!

Now, that's not to say that my experiment was an epic failure, the rolls were actually quite good. They just took forever to bake (which is what I was trying to avoid by using the biscuit dough in the first place), and they fell apart when I tried to pick them up (which good biscuits are supposed to do). The turkey and cheese were good, and with a sweet dough, or even a bread dough, this would make a wonderful snack or compact lunch. The next time I do this, I will follow the recipe. I will beg Nick for some bacon and brown sugar (but I don't think I'll do the maple glaze, I don't like that much sugar), and I will start the night before to give the dough time to rise. That way I can just roll out of bed and pop them in the oven, and they'll be done by the time I wake up! This whole thing has been a lesson in humility. I do not know everything that can ever be known about cooking, and I can not make my own short-cuts all of the time. But this is good, because now that I realize that, I can begin LEARNING how to cook again. Life is good. Zizi